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A Snapshot of the Plot of the Inner Solar System

Posted by michael on from the got-rocks? dept.

BawbBitchen writes "The BBC is running an interesting story about a bunch of Astronomers who have produced a snapshot of the Solar System as of 26 July 2002. Here is the full image and here is a 5.1MB animated GIF (each frame is 961 x 961 pixels) of the map. The credits say it was generated on an OpenVMS system using the PGPLOT graphics library and the animation was done on a RISC OS 4.03 system."

2 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Never mind the NEOs, check out the asteroid belt! by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Check out all that stuff floating outside Mars orbit!

    It's icy asteroids outside the icing point of the sun- at that distance water is in the form of ice and sublimes only over enormous timescales.

    Water is an okish fuel for rockets- the ISP of steam is about 190 seconds, just under half the thrust of the space shuttle main engines, even if you don't split it into hydrogen and oxygen.

    Basically, if you can reach that, the whole solar system is open to you- so much fuel you wouldn't know which way to go first...

    --

    -WolfWithoutAClause

    "Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
  2. Re:Too much noise by Stoutlimb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "pretty, but not very informative"

    Heck no. Have you noticed that Jupiter's lagrange points are fairly populated. I never knew that before, and I took 3 years of astrophysics at the university level. Just goes to show, you learn something new every day.

    Bork!